A Brief history of flame retardants in furniture

Update: Maine's legislature on August 2, 2017 passed the first comprehensive ban on chemical flame retardants sold in new furniture in the entire nation!

QUICK OVERVIEW RE: FLAME RETARDANTS IN UPHOLSTERED FURNITURE

Condo Sofa designs have been bench crafted using materials without chemical flame retardants since early 2012. We passed tests in November 2013 to be in compliance with the new TB 117-2013 law signed into effect January 1, 2014.

Our Condo Sofa designs were fully compliant with the newer standard signed by Governor Brown in November 2013. We had already removed all chemical flame retardants from our furniture designs and were first conventionally constructed furniture designs to voluntarily alter our construction to comply California chemical flame retardants legislation that went into effect January 1, 2015.

We expected the second half of the law’s implementation on January 1, 2015 to be a ban on the use of toxic flame retardant chemicals in furniture sold to residential consumers, but the law actually fell short of a ban.

Regardless, we removed from our store all products without clear labelling to indicate they are made without chemical flame retardants, and do not sell any furniture that contains chemical flame retardants or added formaldehyde.

When a chemical flame retardant got tested for long enough to amass an irrefutable body of evidence to prove it dangerous, California would add it to its list of banned compounds (Prop 65) and then the chemical companies would readily replace that compound with another, making a molecular alteration that would sidestep only lead to a new round of testing that would lead to the same conclusion: carcinogenic again.

To a large extent, the flow of revenues from making and selling chemical flame retardants continued without interruption. California’s own list of banned toxins includes several variations of chemical flames retardants that have much in common with flame retardants still in use. By using chemical alterations to switch compounds when one became a known carcinogen, chemical companies stayed a step or two ahead of state or federal actions to expose and stop the use of harmful chemical flame retardants in consumer products.

That’s how California, a state usually recognized for clean air and other forward-thinking legislation, kept that misguided law on its books from 1975 until Governor Jerry Brown overhauled the bill, called Technical Bulletin 117, which required the inclusion of flame retardants in residential home furnishings like upholstered seating. TB-117 2013, signed in November 2013, ultimately fell short of banning chemical flame retardants, it just no longer requires them to be in the furniture, provided the furniture passes the same tests as it had been subjected to all along.

Despite extensive evidence that the flame retardants are not helping, but potentially adding dangerous risk of cancer to consumers’ lives, some manufacturers still choose to use these very same chemicals in residential home furnishings.

Since becoming involved in the furniture industry in 2004, Endicott Home Furnishings has tried to apply a balanced approach to energy and clean living principles, using renewable energy (wood pellets for heat), recycling as much of the packaging as possible, etc. Affordability and practicality had to stay central to our product selection. It made no sense, then, when designing a line of furniture for smaller, efficient, and often airtight homes, to include chemicals that were only required in California by a law that could not stand much longer in the face of growing consumer awareness and academic scrutiny.

We decided to eradicate from our own designs all the flame retardants of questionable merit, making our furniture temporarily illegal for sale in California. As long as we aspired to serve a primarily New England market as a very small business, this was an easy decision with little financial consequence to us. When California laws were updated, we were the only ones with designs that removed all toxic flame retardants from conventionally designed furniture, expecting others would soon follow our example to be able to sell in California by 2015. (Again, the law never really banned the use of chemical flame retardants, so we find ourselves, more than 8 years after deciding to get rid of chemical flame retardants, still having this conversation.)

We decided to remove unnecessary toxic materials and replace them with less dangerous materials, provided we would not add to the cost or lower the quality of our designs. Condo Sofa is a conventionally built line of furniture with the best of old school construction eight-way hand-tied springs) and new technology to be able to modify our nontoxic sofa designs without compromising quality. We can modify frame styles and features, or we can fit a piece to your body or your wall space, or both. It also means our designs are much less expensive than 100% organic options or purely custom furniture, which often use certified organic materials not everyone needs, and which often add up to more than most people can afford.